My Dad, my reading hero

According to an article I saw in BookBrunch, dads are being urged to read more to their kids.

This, broadly, is a very good notion, and it’s a really strong article too, including some of the reasons why dads in particular might not naturally be the read-out-louders in a family.

This made me think (fondly) of my own dad, and the reading journey he encouraged for me.

But let’s be clear: my dad never read out loud to me. That just didn’t stop him becoming my reading hero.

I think my dad might be dyslexic. I don’t know for definite, because I’m not a qualified person to be able to diagnose him, but I have some examples of why I think this. For one, he always writes in block capital letters. He has neat, careful, dare I say engineer-style handwriting when he writes shopping lists or measurements for whatever bit of wood he needs to cut for his next project. But whenever I’ve seen him try to write in small letters, usually in birthday cards, his writing is much less assured. He seems to find writing comfort in capitals, and I have no idea if that’s a dyslexia thing, but it’s something I’ve noticed.

Speaking of birthday cards, I have a cousin called Michael. I distinctly remember one year, I must have been five, my dad gave him a birthday card that essentially consisted of every possible permutation of “Mikal, Mihceal, Michel” etc written on the inside left flap. In the end, on the left-hand side, he wrote “Happy Birthday Mike”.

Also, every time I needed a sick note or an apology letter for missing school, I had to write it myself. My dad would sign them, but he made me write the notes because he can’t spell “sincerely”.

Anyway, my dad never read to me.

And yet, I was always a thoroughly bookish child. I’ve been on podcasts extolling my love of Heidi. I demolished every Enid Blyton on my cousin’s bookshelf before moving onto (and scaring myself silly with) Robin Jarvis. I got moved to Big Girl books in Year Three because I was reading at a more advanced level than the school usually expected at that age, and as you can imagine I made that my entire personality for a while.

And my dad encouraged this voracity in reading habits. He bought me a mini-dictionary when I kept asking him what words meant and he didn’t always know. He kept me supplied with reading material by sweeping the car boot every weekend for books 50p and under. This meant I also read a lot of inappropriate reading material for my age; lots of romance novels about Victorian girls from slums in London making new lives in America and sleeping with vicars. That kind of thing.

It also meant I developed a significant love for, and knowledge of, classic literature. One of the best things he ever brought me was a huge, door-stopper hardback compendium of Oscar Wilde. I still have it, with the pencilled “75p” scrawled inside the front cover.

And my dad does read. Usually in the bath, and we have very different tastes, given I’m into fantasy and horror and he reads mainly crime fiction and some historical, but there was always a book on the windowsill in the bathroom when I was a kid, demonstrating to me that despite what other people said about time and stress, adults do read, and therefore it wasn’t remotely strange to me that I should love it so much.

So basically, yes, maybe dads should read to their kids more. I’d have liked it, I’m sure, but if you’re a dad and you don’t feel confident in doing that - it’s not the only way to encourage your kids to love books. You could, just like my dad, use it as incredibly cheap childcare to keep ‘em occupied while you disappear into your shed to mess about with bits of wood, scrawling on them with block capitals.